It’s the ‘first law enforcement action of its kind against such a cryptocurrency mixer service’, according to Europol.
Dutch financial authorities, working with Europol, have seized control of six servers in the Netherlands – shutting down one of the largest cryptocurrency mixing services in the world.
Bestmixer.io had been running for a year, and has mixed around $200 million in BTC, BCH and LTC since May 2018. The operation against it has run almost as long, starting in June last year.
Mixers are services that pool funds from many different users, moving them between multiple different addresses before paying out funds to fresh addresses held by the customer. The result is that it is difficult or impossible to determine where the funds originated. Thus a mixer or ‘tumbler’ service can be used to anonymise funds gained or used illegally – for example, in the course of drugs purchases, or for money laundering. Bestmixer.io was one of the world’s three largest mixer services. Analysis shows that many of the funds that entered the mixer came from criminal activities, and that funds paid out by the mixer were similarly used for criminal purposes – chiefly money laundering.
This is believed to be the first action of its kind against a cryptocurrency mixing service – although other illegal bitcoin-powered operations (such as darkweb markets) have previously been shut down by the authorities, as early as 2013, when US agents took action against the Silk Road.
Users of Bestmixer.io may have cause for concern beyond the loss of their favourite service. The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) has collected information about users and their interactions on Bestmixer over the past year – including IP addresses, transactions, Bitcoin addresses and chat messages. This will now be analysed by the FIOD and Europol, and the information will be shared with intelligence agencies from other countries.
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